by John English
The criticism of the adults, however, left its mark. Deemed unreliable by some of his friends, lazy and ineffective by his enemies, Trudeau himself seemed to view the fifties later as a lost decade. When he published his memoirs in 1993, he allotted only five of the 368 pages to the period between his departure from the Privy Council Office in October 1951 and the election of Jean Lesage in 1960. He knew about the comments of his friends—Casgrain wrote in the early 1970s and Pelletier in the 1980s—yet he did not bother to refute them, much less the harsher comments of his enemies. He seemed to treat politics as a plaything, flirting with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), skewering Louis St. Laurent and Duplessis in the media, and periodically announcing a bold initiative for a new political grouping. It is hardly surprising that the blondes, the cars, the clothes, and the travel made even his friends wonder whether this extraordinarily gifted young man was truly “serious.” But he was.
Trudeau’s papers and writings indicate that the 1950s were fundamental in shaping the role he would later play so dramatically in both Quebec and Canada. That was the decade when he did become serious and consistent. Moreover, he began very ably to shape his adolescent thoughts of a public life into an adult reality. It was not an easy task. In his memoirs, he says that “people have often asked me whether, in the 1950s, I already had political ambitions. I have always answered in the negative, which was the truth.”11 It is a partial truth: only if you take an extremely narrow view of political ambition—specifically, election to a legislature—is the statement true. Even then, he did consider such a political career as early as 1952.
These personal papers also reveal a disconnect in this decade between the image of the brilliant but erratic bohemian and the reality of his life. Even more than the forties, when he moved from being a conservative Quebec Catholic nationalist to a cosmopolitan francophone on the left, the fifties was a transformative decade for him. He became deeply grounded within the political life of Quebec, and he gained political skills as he participated in the protracted assault by Quebec intellectuals and the liberal media on Maurice Duplessis’s government. Simultaneously, he began his fateful encounters with the English-Canadian intellectuals in person and with the broader English-Canadian public through the media.
There are certainly moments of insouciant bohemianism in Trudeau’s life in the fifties. But there is also great ambition, diligence, and a deliberate attempt to create a public presence that confronted not only Duplessis’s Union nationale government but also Canada’s lazy sense of conformity. Although Trudeau had no regular job, he worked hard on labour arbitration boards and on his journalistic writing, which appeared not only in Cité libre but also in Vrai, a newspaper edited by his crusading friend Jacques Hébert. There were letters to the editor, travel pieces for Le Devoir, attacks on various wrongs, and piles of handwritten letters to friends and foes. He was a painfully careful writer, revising drafts several times as he sought the perfect word. Usually, he found it. Pelletier later recalled how Trudeau would labour over a minor piece for Vrai and submit it at the last possible minute for publication. And he worked for several years on his major intellectual effort, an edited study of the Asbestos Strike. When it finally appeared in 1956, it immediately set off intellectual explosions in classrooms, editorial pages, and secular and religious chapels.
Books mattered, but Trudeau realized in the fifties that the new media—initially the radio, then television—were becoming fundamental to shaping public debate. On radio his quick repartee, distinctive voice, and immediate expression of emotion brought frequent invitations to participate in debates and discussions. Not so on television, where, initially, he was wary, hesitant, and not very good. Soon he mastered his presentation, however, and it became the medium that carried his message and personality far beyond the intellectual crowd at Cité libre. The proportion of Quebec homes with television grew from only 9.7 percent in 1953 to 38.6 percent in 1955, to 79.4 percent in 1957, and 88.0 percent in 1960—a higher number than for Canada as a whole. Very quickly, the audience that mattered most were the groups of people surrounding the black and white box every evening in Quebec homes.12 Trudeau’s face became familiar; his voice, compelling, as television aerials sprouted at astonishing speed above homes not only in Montreal and Quebec City but in the small towns and villages of Quebec. And he made sure he maintained close ties with television producers and personalities. Alec Pelletier was a producer; his former roommate Roger Rolland worked for Radio-Canada and his Cité libre colleague Pierre Juneau for the National Film Board; and several other acquaintances had employment or other ties in the field. He ceased to search for university jobs that would place him in classrooms rather than in living rooms.13 He wanted a defined and carefully constructed public presence. He also wanted his independence and privacy. The tension between these competing desires remained until his death.
Trudeau learned to play to the camera. His compelling eyes, even white teeth, and high cheekbones captured the attention of his viewers, who became fascinated with his remarkable ability to shift his expression in an instant from withering contempt to an engaging, bashful smile. He used the debating skills he had honed so well at Brébeuf and in hundreds of evenings in Paris, in Pelletier’s home, and “on the road.” Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated Canadian media analyst and gifted phrase-maker, soon noticed this new talent on the “cool” medium of television and wrote to Trudeau, “You’ve got the cool image, the mask.” There was an almost mystical link between Trudeau and television, he said: “The story of Pierre Trudeau is the story of the Man in the Mask. That is why he came into his own with TV.”
McLuhan’s comments intrigued Trudeau, and the ambitious young Quebecer struck up a friendship with the professor, often making unannounced visits to his home in Wychwood Park in Toronto. “The medium shapes the message,” McLuhan quipped, and, in this electronic age, television was the medium for politics and campaigning—politicians, henceforth, would need to have charisma. Trudeau should not worry about possible contradictions in his developing ideas, he advised, but should “probe” wherever his thoughts led him. “It freed me up,” Trudeau reminisced later, after this mentor’s death. In McLuhan’s view, Canada, and especially French Canada, possessed a profound “cultural gap.” French Canada “leapt into the 20th century without ever having had a 19th century. Like all backward and tribal societies, it is very much ‘turned on’ or at home in the new electric world of the 20th century.”14 The statement oversimplifies, but it also emphasizes, rightly, the enormous impact television had on Quebec, as well as Trudeau’s warm relationship with the camera.
The mystical mingled with simple good luck and crafty planning to make Trudeau’s television presence so striking. He consciously created an aura of intrigue, adventure, and intellectual brilliance about him. The last came easily to Trudeau, although, characteristically, he sometimes had private doubts.*
The mystery, so important to the culture of celebrity in the twentieth century, became part of the Trudeau image that he and others created in the fifties. Although his travels often inconvenienced his collaborators, they initially dominated the content of his public appearances on radio and television. As his critics noted, he romanticized his voyages.
On Radio-Canada on May 5, 1950, for example, the broadcaster Jean Sarrazin painted a “Portrait of Pierre Trudeau” that Trudeau corrected himself before the broadcast—one of the changes being his addition of “Elliott” to the title. Sarrazin began the broadcast by noting how “French Canadians like to travel.” He then proceeded to describe how Trudeau had toured the world with only a backpack, a few dollars, and a beard. He “clandestinely” created “some ultra-official documents” that permitted him to penetrate the Iron Curtain. The most beautiful women in Europe were in Budapest, and he spent “voluptuous nights on the Danube!” The voyage continued in breathless prose as Trudeau became a postwar blend of Phileas Fogg and James Bond, fearing none, confronting evil, and meeting gorgeous women at u
nexpected moments. There was, for example, the time in Turkey when he was offered a bath: “Tragedy! He did not understand the sign and entered the women’s section entirely nude … the beautiful Ottomans cried and sighed.” Once again, he was expelled from the country.
The tale of dash and daring forged on, of the young Canadian with the backpack who went “behind the Iron Curtain … encountered Greek guerrillas, the war in Palestine, the troubles in Afghanistan, the war between India and Pakistan, the Burmese revolution, the battles in Indochina, and civil war in China. He was in prison ten times, shot at three times … And yet survived to tell the story.” The last word on the broadcast belonged to Trudeau: no matter how perilous the journey, he said, it had been worthwhile because he “saw how human beings are good when you present yourself without pretension.”15 The story, of course, bore only passing resemblance to the accounts in his letters home. Altogether, it indicated that Pierre Trudeau had already learned how to make himself a lively story. He knew that presentation mattered as much as content.
Part of the presentation involved his clothes, hand tailored not at Eaton’s or Holt Renfrew, but by an Italian tailor working with the finest imported cloth and sometimes even silk. Occasionally, he would wear his father’s dramatic black cape. Accessories such as scarves or gloves he often bought on European trips, where he also purchased some vintage wines unknown in Quebec, even though he was abstemious where alcohol was concerned. In the photographs of the early fifties, Gérard Pelletier, Jean Marchand, and most of the others have cigarettes in their fingers, tousled hair, and jackets a bit askew. Trudeau, in contrast, has a short haircut, never a cigarette (although he had tried smoking in the early forties), and, even in casual wear, clothes that seem to fit perfectly. He bought the best but, as Marc Lalonde later pointed out, he kept it for a long time, depending on an excellent sense of personal style in his clothing.16
Certainly, he is fit himself: the enormous stock of photographs of Trudeau in a bathing suit, surprisingly bikini-like for the times, reveals an adolescent’s lean, well-muscled body. He tended it carefully, to the point of taking ballet lessons to learn how artists control their movement.* Similarly, he supplemented the boxing skills learned from his father with the Japanese self-defence system of karate. All these acquired abilities created a shield, along with the personal self-confidence that sometimes seemed “swagger” to others. René Lévesque, for example, once said that Trudeau had an “inborn talent for making you want to slap his face.” As Pelletier remarked, René would have “taken good care to avoid a dust-up with Pierre … because he [Lévesque] was gifted for boxing the way Muhammad Ali is for embroidery.”17 Despite his average stature, Trudeau intimidated physically.*
Once he returned to Montreal, Quebec politics quickly became his main preoccupation. His Ottawa experience had soured him on federal politics, though it had intrigued him in terms of the potential he now saw in federalism. Still, he was annoyed by the dull, anglophile style of the capital and by the government’s integration of Canadian defence and foreign policy with that of the United States. He respected Louis St. Laurent, but the francophone prime minister disappointed him because he expected him to be another charismatic Laurier and not a “chairman of the board,” while Lester Pearson, the external affairs minister and the most popular politician in the Canadian media, did not impress him much. He now also detested the Duplessis government and thought little of the Liberal opposition in Quebec City. He could not abide the anonymity of being a civil servant, particularly the requirement that he remain silent on public issues. Freed of such restraints and home in Montreal, he expressed his political interests through his pen and his media presentations and, to a much lesser extent, through membership in the CCF. Among the Cité libre crowd, Trudeau’s specialization quickly became politics and international affairs—areas that fitted in well with his desire to travel.*
But the team was not amused when, on October 24, 1951, just a few weeks after his return to Montreal from Ottawa, he set off on yet another grand tour for the winter and spring to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—including a visit to the Soviet Union.
Trudeau’s decision to attend the International Economic Conference in Moscow in the spring of 1952 so soon after his departure from the Privy Council Office troubled his former Ottawa colleagues. As a civil servant working in the Privy Council, he had been granted the highest security clearance and access to top-secret diplomatic dispatches. Meanwhile, in Washington, Senator Joe McCarthy and his henchmen were hounding suspected Communists, and, ever since the Gouzenko spy affair of 1945–46, Canada had been a favourite hunting ground. When Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, defected, he revealed the existence of a spy network within the Canadian government. It was a dreadful time—one of paranoia and fear. The Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman, who had been linked with Asian Communists while a student and teacher at Harvard, was already in McCarthy’s sights, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover even expressed doubts about Lester Pearson. Trudeau, moreover, had made no secret of his strong opposition to American foreign policy.
When Norman Robertson, the clerk of the Privy Council, heard about Trudeau’s imminent departure, he recalled his former officer’s arguments against the Korean War and in favour of reconciliation with the Communists.18 He was concerned that Trudeau was setting off to Moscow just as the Soviet Union was imposing even greater restrictions on the freedom of Canadian diplomats in the capital. As a result, Trudeau’s path was carefully followed by External Affairs personnel, and they assured Canada’s allies that Trudeau had guaranteed them he would reveal no secrets.
After an initial disagreement with Robertson about his even attending the conference, Trudeau obtained credentials as a reporter for Le Devoir. The other members of the Canadian delegation were well-known figures on the left, including Morris Miller, who had been a classmate at Harvard and at the London School of Economics. As Trudeau departed from Prague on his way to Moscow, he told journalists (according to a report from a Canadian Embassy official) that the conference “would provide the first step for the establishment of economic and trade relations between capitalist states and countries with planned economies.” It did not. He also claimed that the conference had attracted “lively interest” in Canada. Again it had not, except, perhaps, in the East Block and the Communist Party of Canada.
On March 31, 1952, Pravda announced the arrival in Moscow of Pierre Trudeau, “lawyer and adviser on trade-union questions.” The Canadian Embassy contacted him and he met the chargé d’affaires, Robert Ford—a poet and perhaps the shrewdest diplomat ever to serve in Moscow during the Cold War. Ford dismissed the conference as propaganda and paid little attention to Canadian delegation members apart from Trudeau. He reported to Ottawa that Trudeau, unlike the other delegates, continued to check into the embassy “for advice and also to inform us of what was going on.” He was “useful” as he gave them copies of the conference proceedings. Ford soon realized that Trudeau was not the usual “fellow traveller” from the West. He quickly irritated his Russian “guide,” for example, by asking why there were so many portraits of Stalin and none of Trotsky. The two men seem to have had fun together: Ford introduced him to caviar at the embassy, where Trudeau spent more and more of his time as he quickly became fed up with the conference itself. Still, Ford found him “puzzling” and wondered what “his real attitude to this country is.”
There, in the darkest days of the Cold War, with madness insinuating its effects even more deeply into Stalin’s aged mind, Ford and Trudeau argued about the meaning of Soviet Communism. Trudeau, according to Ford’s memoranda to Ottawa, had been greatly impressed by the conference sessions on Soviet living conditions. He described conversations with three Soviet academic economists, and he took those exchanges as support for his belief that people could associate freely in Moscow. Trudeau, Ford continued, “claims his position is that of a neutralist-idealist and that it is possible for men of good will to try to act as a c
entre group which will gradually widen and prevent the two extremes from clashing.” Ford strongly disagreed: “I am willing to believe that his feelings on this subject are genuinely idealistic, but I am afraid that he fails to realize that being neutral in the present struggle seems inevitably to involve leaning over backward to justify Russian actions, on the one hand, and to criticize the Western position, and particularly the United States, on the other.” This idealistic strain was, in Ford’s words, accompanied by “a kind of infantile desire to shock”—one that would not matter in Montreal but did very much in Stalin’s Moscow.*
Trudeau went to the American Embassy chapel to attend Easter Mass. There, at midnight, he met the wife of the American chargé. In a provocative mood, he told her, yes, he was Catholic but a Communist too, “after which he proceeded to heap praises on the U.S.S.R. and attack the United States.” Or so the dispatch to Ottawa reported. Ford encountered an angry American diplomat the next day: “I thought you said Trudeau was not a Red?” Ford denied he was, but then the American repeated Trudeau’s remarks to his wife. Ford responded that Trudeau was simply joking. Nevertheless, he told Ottawa that he was sure a report would “go back to the State Department that a man who only six months ago was employed in a confidential job in the Privy Council is now in Moscow … and has openly stated that he is a Communist.”
Not for the first time, Trudeau knew he had gone too far. He sent a handwritten letter to Norman Robertson, copied to several desks in External Affairs, in which he said that he had “half heeded” his advice not to go by gaining his press credentials. Claiming he held “few men in higher regard” than Robertson, he defended his decision to attend because of his urge to travel. Then, unctuously, he concluded: “I trust that Spring is finding Mrs. Robertson and your daughters in the best of health, and that you are finding life in the Privy Council Office as pleasant and as stimulating as I always did.” Indeed.19
